... And then play a single 'Enhance... enhance... enhance... print that!' scene from CSI and say, 'We do that.'

Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.

I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.

To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.

They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.

But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.

I don't think that's required any more - not on Linux or Mac OS X, anyway. I use rsync several times a day and each time it just reads my ~/.ssh/config file for the options, sets up the connection and performs the transfer without any fuss or bother.

I haven't set the RSYNC_RSH env parameter since about 2002.

Well, I hope you feel gouda bout it, because for my part I cheddar at the thought of what's going to become of this thread. Makes me feel bleu....

But that would entail making improvements.

I haven't seen any since 2006.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree here.

Monetize a specific treatment, don't monetize the idea of treatment - it's incredibly unethical and immoral.

The same way we've been doing it for over 20 years?

You digitize it and create a digital intermediate, edit it, do all your other post mojo, spit out either a finished digital copy and/or spit out an EDL and have a lab matchback to film by cutting a negative to conform to your edits.

Needless to say, that's a huge simplification (the post workflow can be loooooooong, with lots of hand-offs to different specialists) but that's the basic idea.

Did you think editors were physically cutting film? That went away by the mid-90s, outside of niche filmmakers and film students. And even today's film students are likely to go through school without cutting actual celluloid.

It's a skill that's great to have simply because it teaches you to be economical and plan ahead. Editors who started on film often have an easier time of planning their edits, rather than dicing things up in the timeline until something looks good.

Or as we in KAOS like to put it:

STARKER! ZIS IS DE INTERNET! VE DON'T COUNTRY ON DE INTERNET!!

Not sure about this. While numerous national laws apply to overseas citizens (e.g. child abuse laws in Canada, Aus and the US), French citizenship is a little different. You cannot renounce French citizenship; it's simply not possible. So secrecy laws and various others which can and sometimes do conflict with human rights might be harder to enforce in a court of law.

But hey, the Napoleonic code on which French law is based differs significantly from Common Law, with which I'm more familiar, so I'm nearly certain to be upholding the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of talking through my hat. :-)

Well, the way you describe it, there's just no defense against that. But consider the following:

Many companies and individuals legitimately use tax havens as a way of keeping money offshore until they need it. The moment it enters their domestic bank account, of course, it can become capital gains/earnings and therefore subject to tax. But because they do a lot of business overseas, they leave a chunk parked in order to avoid unnecessary fees. So they use this as a floating pot they can dip into to conduct business at lower cost, and then pay the taxes whenever they repatriate some part of it.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is what you describe.

The problem is that regulatory oversight is slack-to-nonexistent, and that the entire system (like so many other parts of the financial sector) has been gamed so badly that the entire thing is widely (and justifiably) viewed as a sham.

Ironically, 9/11 put an end to some of the worst abuses. The US got so worried about stopping terrorist financing operations that they created a very strict new set of rules, and enforced them by disallowing anyone on their black list from trading in US currency. Smartened up a number of countries in a hurry.

So yeah, those rich schmucks are still hiding their money, but at least it's (slightly) harder for them to buy drugs and guns.... *sigh*

The worst part is, the people who pushed this legislation are the same ones who will dance over the remains of a bankrupt Post Office, proudly declaring that "greedy" workers were to blame. Even though no government agency, union or private company would even dream up something like this. I'm pretty sure pre-funding 75 years of retirement in a decade's time would get a CEO / board of directors sacked in oh... about a week.

It's actually a two-pronged assault. The primary goal is to destroy the finances of an institution the legislative branch is constitutionally-mandated to preserve. The second is to continue the war on worker pensions and benefits, while shaming those who believe the quality of life enjoyed by past generations is something to aspire to.

They really believe all of that silly retirement stuff our parents and grandparents did was a manifestation of pure avarice and laziness.

Heh, that just lens itself to humour, doesn't it.

Sorry I'll f-stop. I know what'll happen if iris one more pun. I shutter at the thought.

I have a soft spot for the new Start Screen. I find it much more appealing than the old Start Menu which seemed more like a Start Slab by the time it was deprecated. The initial concept had been compromised by the amount of crap that it was asked to handle. Using a tile-based system is a great way to package different sources of data and information into neat little groupings. We can agree to disagree on that one.

My problem is that the rest of the Metro UI doesn't really follow the lead of the Start Screen at all. Aesthetically, it jettisons the entire look and feel for what seems like a bunch of images and text adrift in a lot of whitespace.

Icons have little or no depth at all. They don't really adhere to their origins in minimalist mass transit iconography as the Start Screen does, nor do they acknowledge the benefits of effective drop shadows - or really any developments since the year 2000. I'm pretty sure the version of KDE that shipped with my copy of LinuxPPC 1999 was the aesthetic equal in this one regard.

Text is widely spread out with no clear delineation between where one active area begins and another ends. Even info grouped together appears to take up a significant amount of screen real estate. Not due to font sizing issues, but rather, the line spacing and just random weirdness in the layout. It reminds me less of an OS and more of a poorly-designed Web 2.0 site.

I work in TV / Film production. In the real world.

I've also produced off-air promo reels before - which is basically what the IRS tried to do here. You have no idea how much this sort of thing costs.